Xavier Basurto

Gender equality is a ubiquitous national goal, yet sectoral gender data gaps to support this goal persist. These gaps are both structural and sexist, concealing women’s contributions and impeding actions that would strengthen livelihoods and economic development, food security, and environmental sustainability. The small-scale fisheries sector offers a cogent example of this phenomenon. Building on lessons from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative, we identify systemic changes and specific indicators needed to fill these gaps. This requires multiple data streams, many of which come from outside fisheries agencies, e.g., government statistical or census organizations, sourced from responsible agencies across multiple areas—economy and environment, governance and support services, and health and nutrition. Closing gender data gaps requires making the policy case and working across agencies to create an enabling institutional environment. Only then can data reflect and respond to the lives of the ~ 500 million people who depend on small-scale fisheries.

We provide the first global assessment of the status of preferential access areas (PAAs), a relatively understudied policy tool to govern small-scale fisheries. We find 44 countries, most of them of low or low-middle income, have established a total of 63 PAAs encompassing 3% of continental shelf area worldwide. The analysis of an ad-hoc subsample of twelve countries in three continents for which data were available (2016-2017) revealed that PAAs supported greater amounts of small-scale fisheries marine catch volume, landed value, fishing for self-consumption, and more nutritious species than marine areas outside PAAs. This preliminary assessment suggests that if appropriately enforced through shared governance with fishers and responsible fishing practices, relatively small areas of the ocean could provide important nutrition security, economic, and employment benefits to millions of people living in coastal areas. We offer an agenda for future research and policy action based on our findings.

The diverse characteristics and contexts of small-scale producers underpin their multidimensional contributions to sustainable development, including food provision, resilience, poverty alleviation, and cultural heritage preservation. However, their diversity is often oversimplified, limiting their impact on global development and hindering effective food systems transformation. We use the case of small-scale fisheries, a diverse subsector capable of feeding one in four people globally, to challenge the dominant narrative that small-scale producers are too complex and context specific to be effectively categorised. Our analysis of over a thousand small-scale fisheries, representing 66% of global marine small-scale fisheries, utilised a model-based clustering approach and found five global archetypes of small-scale fisheries. Each archetype was characterised by different operational, socioeconomic, technological, and post-harvest attributes. Our findings start to unlock small-scale fisheries’ potential to contribute meaningfully to food systems transformation. This approach is low-cost, simple to implement and well-suited for decision-making processes in data-limited contexts, particularly in the Global South. The case of small-scale fisheries illustrates how this approach could be transferable to small-scale producers across other food sectors, paving the way for more precise policy-making and enabling their full contributions to sustainable development, potentially benefiting millions of people globally.

Sustainable development aspires to “leave no one behind." Yet, limited attention has been paid to small-scale fisheries (SSF) and their importance in eradicating poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Through a collaborative and multi-dimensional data-driven approach, we have estimated that SSF provide at least 40% (37.3 million tonnes) of global fisheries catches and 2.3 billion people with, on average, 20% of their dietary intake across 6 key micronutrients essential for human health. Globally, the livelihood of one in every twelve people, nearly half of them women, depends at least partially on small-scale fishing, altogether generating 44% (USD 77.2 billion) of total fisheries landed economic value. Regionally, Asian SSF support most catch, livelihoods, and supply nutrition to the largest number of people. Relative to the total capture fisheries sector (comprising large-scale and small-scale fisheries sub-sectors), of all regions African SSF supply the most catch and nutrition, and SSF in Oceania enhance the most livelihoods. Maintaining and increasing these multi-dimensional SSF contributions to sustainable development requires targeted and effective actions, especially increasing engagement of fisherfolk in shared management and governance. Without management and governance focused on SSF’s multi-dimensional contributions, the marginalization of millions of fishers and fishworkers will worsen.

Xavier Basurto outlines the current thinking and empirical data supporting this innovative field. He recently led Illuminating Hidden Harvests for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). This approach fully integrates natural science, social science, and governance to map pathways to solutions in these complex social-ecological systems.

Sustainable development aspires to “leave no one behind”¹. Even so, limited attention has been paid to small-scale fisheries (SSF) and their importance in eradicating poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Through a collaborative and multidimensional data-driven approach, we have estimated that SSF provide at least 40% (37.3 million tonnes) of global fisheries catches and 2.3 billion people with, on average, 20% of their dietary intake across six key micronutrients essential for human health. Globally, the livelihood of 1 in every 12 people, nearly half of them women, depends at least partly on small-scale fishing, in total generating 44% (US$77.2 billion) of the economic value of all fisheries landed. Regionally, Asian SSF provide fish, support livelihoods and supply nutrition to the largest number of people. Relative to the total capture of the fisheries sector (comprising large-scale and small-scale fisheries), across all regions, African SSF supply the most catch and nutrition, and SSF in Oceania improve the most livelihoods. Maintaining and increasing these multidimensional SSF contributions to sustainable development requires targeted and effective actions, especially increasing the engagement of fisherfolk in shared management and governance. Without management and governance focused on the multidimensional contributions of SSF, the marginalization of millions of fishers and fishworkers will worsen.